Homage
to Mistress
Oppenheimer
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From its nonce villanelles to its Miami stornelli, HOMAGE TO MISTRESS OPPENHEIMER is a masterful display of linguistic dexterity and formal invention. This is writing that engages both the heart and the intellect even as it performs high-order poetic hijinks of the sort Richard Wilbur and Paul Muldoon would admire. A terrific book from a poet of depth and originality.. — Campbell McGrath
The virtues of this book—clarity of style, formal invention, imaginative depth—require little by way of explication. They are simple, and therefore profound—minor miracles become the stuff of major poetry. — Spencer Hupp, The Sewanee Review
Steve Kronen is a master of … a poetry in which the craft is deep and various …. Kronen’s embrace of traditional forms is both assured and innovative. ….a strong book, unfashionable in its artistic gusto and challenging in intellectual range. — Michael Hettich, The Florida Review
HOMAGE TO MISTRESS OPPENHEIMER is a collection that hangs in the balance--between the apocalyptic and the everyday, fate and choice, love and death. Like nuclear fission itself, these poems transmute themselves, taking on the forms of twisted sestinas and transformational terza rima to take on the constant movement of their subject matter: the business of being a person with an awareness of both science and God. From abstract associations that shift from the universal to the specific, Kronen pares his poems down to still, sparse considerations of enduring love, fatherhood, free will and, finally, our uniquely human awareness of oblivion. At once poignant, funny, and distortedly original, this collection is unmissable.
